Poker Tourney

[Robbie Robb]

As Zy mentioned - stacks and blinds depends on how long you want the tourney to run. Nikki & I run a monthly game and we've been tweaking the structure each month. I *think* we've finally arrived at something that everyone is happy with. It goes a little something like this... (hit it!)

# of players: 14-20 (we run two tables to start)
buyin: $10
stack size: 2000
blinds: Okay, this is where we go WAY off the normal (read: casino) path. This was in response to overall player recommendation. We bump up the blinds to the next level whenever someone is knocked out, or one hour, whichever comes first. We find that it's pretty much a dead heat for the first increase but then people start to drop rather rapidly These also means that we could skip levels completely.
levels: 10/20; 20/40; 30/60; 40/80; 50/100; at this point we do a chip swap dumping 10s and 20s, swapping them out for 100s and 25s. Carrying on: 75/150; 100/200; 150/300; 200/400. Now we start to see some antes: 200/400/25; 250/500/50; 300/600/75; 400/800/100; 500/1000/125; 600/1200/150; 700/1400/175; 800/1600/200.
Note: we cap the blinds at their max level when we're down to three players. With 14-20 people we find the game usually lasts about 3-4.5 hours, depending on the night.

As for payouts, anything < 15 people is three payouts: 50%, 25%, 15%. 15 or more we bump it up to four spots (and I let The Tournament Director software figure out the payouts).